“The sons of the prophet were valiant and bold, and quite unaccustomed to fear…”
You’d be forgiven for not noticing that one principal character is wholly absent from the perfectly balanced “Family,” for reasons which become apparent with the next episode in Season Four of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Data doesn’t turn up in “Family” because he was too busy preparing for his own magnum opus on the same subject, the astonishingly good “Brothers,” which features the return of Lore and the introduction of both androids’ creator, Dr. Noonien Soong. And to further explain Brent Spiner’s absence from the prior episode, Spiner plays all three.
To my delight, the episode is written by Rick Berman himself, who very rarely came out of the executive producer’s office to hand down a script, but was sneakily responsible for some of the series’ better entries. At the start of Season Four, Berman gets elevated to full executive producer status, his name appearing at the tail of every episode alongside Gene Roddenberry’s, who had – as of the end of the previous season – stepped away from his day-to-day duties on the show. In the years and decades to come, Berman would become somewhat of a controversial figure among the fans – as all people in such positions inevitably do – but on the balance, I’m with Berman. He was at the helm of the Enterprise for fifteen years and two of the franchise’s best series. Who gives a fuck if Nemesis sucks?
“Brothers” is also Rob Bowman’s single return to the series after directing several of the landmark episodes of its first two seasons, and it’s a welcome reminder of the power of his intense, dynamic visual style. (His choice to play a couple of gags in the first act on empty frames, with our heroes conversing offscreen throughout, would still be deemed ballsy today.) Things get off at a gallop with the whole opening sequence, in which Data hijacks the Enterprise – something which, I presume, we all suspected he could do given the opportunity, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to watch how he actually does it. Notably, he initiates a blue alert – life support failure – and who knew the ship could do that? By the time Data enters the world’s longest password to lock up the bridge as he’s about to beam down to the surface, we are uncomfortably aware that the emotionless android is very likely the most powerful being in the Federation.
All of this leads us to Soong’s lab on an unnamed planet, and the endless delight of watching Brent Spiner play scenes against himself – and later, himself against himself against himself, when Lore shows up unexpectedly for the impromptu family reunion. (Does anyone want to raise the question of why B-4 doesn’t turn up? Of course not. Because Nemesis sucks.)
It’s a monstrously complex episode from a technical standpoint, obviously, and I don’t even want to contemplate the amount of time Spiner spent in the prosthetics chair to play all three of the characters, particularly Soong, who – per The Simpsons – looks sort of like he’s been melted. Bowman does a good job with the tools of the era to work out split-screen gags that are more than just locked-off two-shots (he must have studied Back to the Future II like a motherfucker). But that’s all window-dressing to the main event anyway, which is a tripartite performance from Spiner that breaks my heart in pretty much three different directions every single time; the pathos of Soong, and the pathos of Lore, and the pathos of emotionless Data… yikes. It’s an amazing piece of storytelling, and most of me doesn’t even want to think about how it was done.
“Brothers” solves the problem of Lore, who seemed like an improbable berserker in “Datalore” (the events of which have reportedly led to Lore floating through space alone for two years, a rather intriguing idea to contemplate). It also introduces, at Next Gen’s midpoint, the great boon of Data’s quest to be more human: the emotion chip. It’s quite inexcusable that a concept as rich as that would be ultimately be used for little more than comic effect when it was finally put into play in Generations, but I think the writers were just generally afraid of the thing. With reason, too, per a thought that I had after watching “The Most Toys:” what would be the outcome of an emotionless being, the most powerful in the Federation, who has the ability to turn empathy on and off at will? I think we should all thank goodness that Data’s normally such a nice guy.
“Brothers” makes four five-Enterprise episodes in a row, quite rightly putting this tract as the series’ high point.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Four is in stores now.